It’s the Modern World, the End of Times, the Decline of the West, the Revolt of the Masses. It’s the 1920’s. It’s going to be Very Silly.
“The German people are wonderful. They do not touch you, yet they have their arms around you – always.”
From Photoplay, May 1928
“And Ber-lin!” Would that we could reproduce Greta Garbo’s enunciation of Ber-lin. The love there is in it. “I will never forget when I came to it. The smell of the City. An amazing [...]
Something like a picture book for academics… 400 pages of b&w and full-colour images of Berliners and their city in the Roaring Twenties.
Spiegel Online has a nice article about the 1920’s trend of movies about young and independent women. They were called “flappers”, “new women”, モダーンガール。 Stars like Clara Bow, Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks played rebel girls or working women in a type of you-can-do-it stories that seem very modern, very post-1950’s, today. The Berlinale film [...]
The Comedian Harmonists were the greatest German “boy band” of the late 1920’s-early 1930’s. Unfortunately, when Hitler came to power, they were forced to split up, because many of the members were Jewish and weren’t allowed to work in Germany anymore. This is yet another aspect of the destruction that the Nazis wrought on Germany’s [...]
Tomorrow, 88 years will have passed since German politicians - civilians - signed the armistice declaration in a railway carriage at Compiégne, under the watchful eye of France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The German military leaders refused to participate in the “shameful” peace, thus placing the blame on the politicians. The myth of the undefeated army, [...]